Friday, 9 November 2018

How do I Get Artist Consistency in my music collection

Part 8: How do I Get Artist Consistency in my music collection

Before we started digitizing music each album was a separate physical item.We found the one we wanted either because we had ordered our CDs or Vinyl ordered by the main artist or we just looked at a random set of albums until we saw one we fancied listening to.

But with digital music got much larger, and computers are not as good as humans at realizing that slight differences in artist names actually refer to the same artist.

Common problems are:

Artists are not always attributed the same on every release:

Minor differences in names, such as initials, spelling errors

Artist deliberately use different name e.g Prince, , Formerly Known As

Tools that lookup CD such as dbPoweramp do independently of any other CD by same artist, so no consistency and with manual edit, easy to make mistakes and introduce inconsistencies

But SongKong understands Artists as entities ( we store an Artist Id we know who they are). We use MusicBrainz Artist Entities, defacto standard used by BBC, last.fm, Google and Spotify. But our database cross references MusicBrainz and Discogs, so we can use MusicBrainz artists even when we have only matched to a Discogs release.

Each MusicBrainz Artist has a Canonical Name, instead of using name on release we can use their main name for all their releases.If their main name is not in Roman script (eg Пётр Ильич Чайковский) we can use their Roman/English version of name instead.